Grants Program Update, June 2024

The Sia Foundation has grant funding available for community contributors! The Grants Program was created to fund research, development, developer tools, and anything else that will support and further our mission of user-owned data while enriching the Sia ecosystem.

Just design a proposal that meets our requirements, submit it to our forums, and wait for review by our grants committee. If your grant gets approved, you’re on your way to creating the next great project on the Sia storage network.

Check out our site for more info.

The Current State of Grants

The committee has approved four new grants since our last update. The projects share a pretty good mix of ambition, practicality, and creativity falling into our Small and Standard categories. The biggest budget approval was S5 Network by far, with SkyMusic 2, SiaLearn, and Sia NFS Gateway following in descending order.

Interestingly, three of these four grants are continuations of existing grants, allowing our developers the time and resources to really build something special and flourish in the Sia ecosystem.

That’s not to knock our new grantee though, with the Sia NFS Gateway looking to build an extremely usable set of tooling for Sia. Future potential grantees take note, this was an excellent proposal. Sometimes grant submissions get in their own way with unrelated or excessive information, too granular analysis, or too broad scopes. If I recall correctly the committee’s deliberation and discussion on this grant was pretty short, because it was so easy to understand and even easier to approve.

Among rejected grants proposals, we have Collect3 and NFS/iSCSI protocols. While both were ambitious projects from talented devs, the committee felt that both suffered from scope issues that go a bit beyond wha the Foundation is willing to fund.

Regardless, the committee is happy to see new proposals come in and anyone is welcome to re-apply at any time. Here’s a recap of the latest approvals.

Proposal: S5 Network 2024

Link

What is it?

Redsolver submitted a new proposal to build and expand the S5 network developed in his previous grant. Some key components of this grant are stabilizing the S5 specifications to accelerate adoption and improve performance+scalability, and take the Dart and TypeScript libraries production-ready and help devs re-implementing them in other programming languages like Golang. Additionally, he wants to make the flagship Vup App production-ready with a more professional user-friendly design, a web app for easy onboarding and support for collaborative productivity apps like document editing. Finally, he intends to extend the archiver with many more supported sources and deploy a web archiving service powered by Sia.

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

This proposal is from a trusted developer and builds on a grant that has been in process for over a year now. S5 is one of the biggest pieces building on the Sia puzzle now, and we’re really happy to continue this work over the course of the next year.

Proposal: SiaLearn

Link

What is it?

“SiaLearn is a developer educational program designed to provide comprehensive, evergreen training courses and resources for building on the Sia network.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

After a few rounds of comments, the SiaLearn team was able to round out their proposal in a way that resulted in approval of the open source VidTV project and accompanying content.

Proposal: SkyMusic Part 2

Link

What is it?

“SkyMusic is a web based music streaming application and a decentralized alternative to Spotify and YouTube Music that operates on the S5/Sia network. Users can stream music from our library, S3 storage and local sources. SkyMusic primarily utilizes the S5 channel (developed by Redsolver).”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

A greatly refined scope and an otherwise tight proposal focusing on platform development was another fun approval for the commitee.

Proposal: Sia NFS Gateway

Link

What is it?

“sia-nfs provides access to one or more Sia buckets via a regular NFS interface, allowing any compatible client to access the hosted files and directories directly without the need to run a Sia client or renterd. This gateway can be used from localhost to mount a Sia filesystem locally or made available to an entire network. Accessing and mounting are not limited to Linux; clients on MacOS, Windows, and possibly other operating systems should work without major issues. sia-nfswill be implemented in Rust, a safe and performant modern programming language, and will be available on all platforms where renterd is available. The resulting binary will be a standalone solution with no other dependencies besides renterd and common system libraries. This project proposal is in response to an RFP found at https://sia.tech/grants.”

Grant Status

Approved

Notes

As noted earlier in this post, this was one of the best proposals the committee has seen in a while. They liked the focus of the proposal and appreciated the realistic milestones and development goals, and are excited to see how it builds out!

Coming Next

We encourage the community to provide their feedback and ask questions on the Sia Forum! Community contribution and input is the best way to push proposals and projects to the next level.

You can see the list of all proposals here, and our proposal requirements here. See you next month!

Steve

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Grants Program Update, June 2024 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.